Electronic Commerce Research

Public-key cryptography is widely used as the underlying mechanism for securing many protocols and applications in the Internet. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is required to securely deliver public-keys to widely-distributed users or systems. The public key is usually made public by means of a digital document called certificate. Certificates are valid during a certain period of time; however, there are circumstances under which the validity of a certificate must be terminated sooner than assigned and thus, the certificate needs to be revoked. The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is one of the most used protocols for retrieving certificate status information from the PKI. However, the OCSP protocol requires online signatures, which is a costly operation. In this article, we present an improvement over OCSP based on hash chains that reduces the processing burden in the server which in turn provides an additional protection against attacks based on flooding of queries.

The use of imagination is a dominant strategy for consumers to form evaluations in the e-commerce environments. Online Product Presentation Videos (OPPVs) are vivid information that can facilitate consumers this task. Following the imagery fluency approach, we analyze the impact of OPPVs on consumers’ quality of product-related thoughts, ease of imagining, and responses toward the product. A series of studies combining experimental- and survey-based procedures shows that the presence and type of OPPV improves consumers’ cognitive responses and facilitates imagination about the product, which becomes a strong determinant of attitude and purchase intention. We also control for the OPPV’s trustworthiness to isolate the effects of the content characteristics of video. Moreover, we consider the moderating role of the consumer’s motivation to process information. The results demonstrate that high and low motivated consumers use their imagination differently. In addition, when OPPVs are featured by the brand, ease of imagining does not relate to purchase intention.

Using actual purchasing behavior by visitors to a High School Reunion web store, this study examines the factors that lead to an increased willingness by on-line consumers to purchase impulse items. Consistent with mental accounting and the psychophysics of prices, we find that people’s purchase of the impulse item increases with the total amount spent on other items. We also find that linking a US $1 donation to the impulse item, thereby providing a reason to purchase, increases the frequency of the impulse purchase.

In this article, a framework to integrate negotiation capabilities—particularly, components implementing a negotiation strategy—into mobile agents is described. This approach is conceptually based on the notion of an actor system which decomposes an application component into autonomously executing subcomponents cooperating with each other. Technically, the framework is based on a plug-in mechanism enabling a dynamic composition of negotiating agents. Additionally, this contribution describes how interaction-oriented rule mechanisms can be deployed to control the behavior of strategy actors.

Online platforms have emerged to facilitate patent transfer between academia and industry, but a recommendation method that matches patents with company needs is missing in the literature. Previous patent recommendation methods were designed mainly for query-driven patent search contexts, where user needs are given. However, company needs are implicit in the patent transfer context. The problem of profiling the needs and recommending patents accordingly remains unsolved. This research proposes a knowledge graph approach to address the problem. The proposed approach defines and constructs a patent knowledge graph to capture the semantic information between keywords in the patent domain. Then, it profiles patents and companies as weighted graphs based on the patent knowledge graph. Finally, it generates recommendations by comparing the weighted graphs based on the graph edit distance measure. During the recommendation process, three recommendation strategies (i.e., supplementary, complementary, and hybrid recommendation strategies) are proposed to profile different company needs and make recommendations accordingly. The proposed approach has been implemented and tested on a knowledge transfer platform in Jiangxi province, R.P. China. A pretest experiment shows that the proposed approach outperforms several baseline methods in terms of precision, recall, F-score, and mean average precision. User feedback from an online experiment further demonstrates the usability and the effectiveness of the proposed approach for recommending patents to companies.

The conventional wisdom is that Internet commerce substantially reduces the transaction costs for comparison shopping, which in turn intensifies price competition. However, the technology of the Internet marketplace offers retailers tools with the potential to blunt some of this competition. This paper explores the competitive impact of an electronic low price matching policy when firms can track customer search behavior. Using controlled laboratory techniques, we find that through the use of low price matching sellers are able to dampen some of the intense competition spawned when a large proportion of consumers comparison shop.

Mobile commerce applications adhering to anytime and anywhere paradigm, required to be flexible. They should be able to adapt their interface, services and content towards a certain context. Several proposals for definition of context have been already proposed originating from various areas related to mobile commerce. However, an integrated, formal and methodological approach for the determination and representation of context, adjusted to special characteristics of mobile commerce applications, has not been insofar presented. This is the challenge we address in this paper, through a conceptual model that includes: i) a clear and formal definition of context, ii) the depiction of its specific characteristics as metadata, iii) a methodology for its determination and iv) the presentation of an extension of class diagrams of UML for its representation, all of them tailored to the special nature of mobile commerce applications.